Friday, 5 September 2014

Paperless Office-Document Scanning: The New Office Environment

By Loris F. Andres


Administration almost always involves paperwork. Any business, government department or other organization uses forms and official documents in its procedures and archiving system. While this enormous volume of paperwork has traditionally been the subject of annoyance or jokes, paperless office-document scanning offers an electronic alternative.

Paper, printing materials and record storage locations are all part of the expenses of a paper-based operation. Labor is absorbed by maintaining and searching the organization's archives. The physical transportation or sending of paper correspondence also occasionally poses a challenge, in that large collections of records are difficult to move and fax machines do not reliably produce accurate copies of faxed material. Paper records are also easily susceptible to damage or loss.

Environmental activists have raised the issue of how the manufacture of paper uses trees. They oppose the use of paper as a storage or correspondence material. Recycled paper, which was introduced in response to this negative sentiment, is not yet a universally utilized resource. Discarded paper is a significant element of landfill sites and pollution.

The electronic management of documentation therefore makes more sense. An enormous amount of paperwork can be stored on a single USB stick or hard disk. Making back-up copies, even of the entire records of an organization, takes relatively little time. Electronic media occupy very little space, and are easy to transport. E-mail and document cloud facilities make their physical transport unnecessary anyway.

A document cloud service is an internet site that allows user to upload and store large amounts of data, files or documents there. This is convenient because it enables users to access the stored material from anywhere, without the need to keep copies with them in some other form. A cloud service may be paid or free. Potential users are advised to check security features and available storage space to see which option suits them.

Paperless office management has several advantages over older, paper-based methods. The quality of scanned documents is never an issue. Turning to correspondence, e-mails are received in a matter of seconds and can have plenty of material attached to them. The latest attachable file formats may contain several hundred pages of text in less than one megabyte. To fax a document of that length would not be practicable.

The expense of running an office can be greatly reduced through scanning and electronic document archiving. The outlay on the equipment required should be compared to the money saved. Paperless administration represents an area of the economy where those nasty paper cuts can be replaced by the press of a button.




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